“Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al.” by Jonathan Horowitz

2025 · US · colour · En · 30’ · Swiss premiere

Weaving together clips from Hollywood movies and documentary biographies, Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al. explores the psychology of hyper masculinity as it is manifested in both gay culture of the 1970s and authoritarian political ideologies.

“Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al.” explores the psychology of hyper masculinity as it is manifested in both gay culture of the 1970s and authoritarian political ideologies. The starting point for the work is Donald Trump’s adoption of the gay, disco anthem YMCA as his de facto theme song. The work is largely comprised of found footage — most prominently from the Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz and from three Hollywood movies that engage with the subject of male homosexuality — Cruising, Making Love, and Can’t Stop the Music. Narration from two found documentaries is intercut throughout, telling the stories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst and lay scientist, and Jacques Morali, the French impresario and founder of the Village People. Horowitz’s recorded voice is employed as well, at times disguised through AI voice filtering. Numerous other characters and stories come into play, laying bare the travails of gay identity that typified the late seventies and early eighties and bringing to light the patriarchal underpinnings of fascism, from Nazi Germany to the USA today.

The artist

Since the early 1990s, Jonathan Horowitz (b. 1966) has made art that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. Often based in both popular commercial and art historical sources, his work in video, painting, sculpture and photography examines the deep-seated links between consumerism and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art.